“I had a white suit made in 1960, started wearing it in January – and found it annoyed people tremendously. It’s kind of a harmless form of aggression.” Tom Wolfe

The Courageous Adam Silver

Among the many characteristics I find most annoying about liberals is their belief that whatever their stand on a controversy, it is by definition : Courageous.

Take the comically absurd auto-da-fe carried about by NBA commissioner Adam Silver and the entire media/Obama complex against one rich old guy, LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling, for saying something (declared horribly offensive to black people) to his half-black girlfriend who was illegally recording the conversation. As a result Adam Silver has been declared worthy of the Media Medal of Honor which our chief executive will probably bestow on him at a solemn ceremony at the, dare I say it?, White House. Maybe I’m exaggerating the White House ceremony bit, but nowadays I go to bed at night with the firm feeling that They can’t do that, only to awake and find that They did It!

Of course, Silver’s defenestration of Sterling has produced a shit storm of abuse heaped on him by…whom? You wanted to show real courage, Adam? You should have called a press conference and said: What a team owner says in a private conversation (especially one illegally recorded) is none of the NBA’s business, and if the players don’t like it, they can refuse to play and thus not receive their obscenely generous salaries, period (as Barack likes to say).

But just when I think this orgy of self-righteousness could not get worse, I read the following in a story by Matthew Continetti in Commentary Magazine:

“It was real leadership,” consultant Doug Sosnik told Ron Fournier of National Journal, in what has to be my favorite entry in the catalogue of Adam Silver tongue-baths. Sosnik was complimenting the leadership skills of one of his clients; he was cheering Silver for taking his paid advice. And Sosnik was doing this in an interview with his friend Fournier, with whom he (and former Bush adviser Matthew Dowd) co-wrote a book in 2006. The Fournier column, then, is a triple self-advertisement, a free commercial for Sosnik’s business, Sosnik’s book, and Sosnik’s client. Impressive!"